He hesitated, then finally said, “She hung out with us sometimes. Nice girl. I think she worked at a copy place.”
“You know if she had any boyfriends?”
The young man shook his head.
“She buy from anyone else?”
“Everyone does, that’s why it’s such a tough business.”
“It’s no picnic being a consumer either.” He hoped Ernie understood his meaning.
The drug dealer snapped his fingers. “She did mention a guy she was close with who supplied her. I even saw him once. He picked her up from a little party.”
“What’d he look like? What’d he drive? You remember a name?”
Ernie shook his head. “It’s fuzzy in here.” He tapped his temple. “I meet a lot of people and sometimes use my own stuff to keep mellow.”
Stallings quizzed him a while longer until he realized he wouldn’t get anywhere. The young man was cooperating as best he could. He gave the young drug dealer his cell phone number with the instructions to start looking for this mystery dealer and to call him if he found him.
Stallings felt that he might be getting closer as he started questioning the enterprising young drug dealer about anyone else who might be buying a lot of Oxy.
Tony Mazzetti had tagged along with Patty Levine to the Home Depot across I-95 near the PMB. He liked the way she thought and made decisions, both as a person and a cop. She’d tracked down the info on the report from the UF geologist, contacted the manufacturer, and discovered the sole distributor was the largest home- improvement chain in the country. That wouldn’t narrow down things much, but it was a start. Now she just wanted to see how Home Depot maintained their inventory and if tracking the purchasers would be feasible.
Mazzetti liked how she had the huge manager of the store crammed in his minuscule office behind kitchen and bath remodeling going over possible lines of investigation while not scaring the guy into thinking she was a bully. This was the mark of a good cop. He realized he often came off as a bully even when he was trying to be pleasant.
Patty said, “You have to understand, Larry, that this is confidential and no one can know why we’re looking at this line of sand.”
He shook his massive bald head. His drawl was more central Georgia than Florida. It’d taken almost twenty years, but Mazzetti was finally getting his accents and drawls down here straight.
Larry, the manager, said, “Ma’am, I can’t think of nothin’ as important as catching this Bag Man. We’ll help all we can and I won’t say a word, I swear.”
Patty flashed him that perfect smile and squeezed his arm to let him know he was part of the team. It was important to make people feel like they are working with the police instead of working for the police. Mazzetti didn’t know if this guy cared about the investigation that much, but he wasn’t about to let a little hottie like Patty be disappointed. The manager scrambled to find a sheet of paper so even the stupid cops could figure out how the process worked.
“Each store now,” he started in a voice too high for his frame, “gets in a shipment of ten to fifty bags depending on how many the store sold in the previous month.”
Mazzetti marveled at how much effort the man put into his impromptu lecture on the finer points of decorative sand distribution. He wished he had that kind of power over people, where they helped for reasons other than necessity. He just hoped avenues of investigation like this were kept quiet so the investigation could proceed unhindered.
He listened to more details about buying with credit cards or cash and how Patty could find out how many bags were sold and when. She really wanted to know who bought the sand.
“Only way to tell is if they used a credit card. Even then it’d take a good long while,” said the manager. The he added, “Could be talking about a lot of people if we count all the stores in the area and go back a few months.”
Mazzetti started trying to figure an answer for that. This was a piece of the puzzle that might yet fall into place.
John Stallings had never been comfortable in gatherings like this. Even though the concept of dinner meetings made sense, he didn’t like missing meals with his family. But a squad dinner at the Law and Order Pub, less than a mile from the PMB, was a tradition most units kept, even if it was just the occasional meal to boost morale.
Tonight nine detectives and no management were spread along a long table in the rear of the pub that was generally frequented by cops. Right now the bar held only identified Sheriff’s Office personnel so they could speak somewhat freely as each detective caught everyone else up to date on their aspect of the serial killer investigation.
Patty had explained how they might be able to track the purchasers of the sand found on two of the victims. She’d spent the afternoon at a Home Depot, and now, with her natural intelligence and inquisitiveness, she sounded like an expert on how products moved through the giant retailer.
Mazzetti looked down the table from his position at the end and said, “The question now is whether this is a good use of resources.”
Stallings considered the reasonable question as all the other detectives looked to assess the pros and cons as well.
Luis Martinez, always one to move forward, shook his head. “Hell, no, we need to be banging our snitches’ heads. Someone has seen something and is talking about it.”
Mazzetti said, “That’s a good point, Luis, and that’s why we’ll be offering a reward of fifty grand for info starting tonight.”
Someone down the table whistled.
“This Home Depot lead is just another route.” He was about to say something else when he noticed someone standing by the bathroom a few feet from the other end of the table. He recognized him. “Hey, Sarge, what’s up?”
The big man in a blue plaid shirt gave a quick wave and said, “Didn’t mean to interrupt. I was gonna say hey to Stall.”
Stallings smiled at his friend Rick Ellis’s reluctance to approach the table. He spoke up and said, “Just a dinner meeting, Rick.”
“I know y’all are busy so I’ll move along. You guys gotta catch this asshole before the whole city gets spooked.”
Mazzetti said, “I’m working on it.”
Stallings wanted to correct him and say “we” were working on it but that was just Mazzetti. As much as he hated to admit it, the guy had run a decent case and kept everyone on task.
Mazzetti told everyone about Trina Ester working at the Wendy’s, making the whole lead sound like something he developed, not that Stallings had seen her there.
Luis Martinez asked, “Why didn’t they report her as missing?”
Mazzetti said, “Wendy’s isn’t like the S.O. The manager just thought she quit and didn’t tell him. Happens more than half the time.”
Martinez said, “So she didn’t leave with anyone Saturday?”
“Nope. I even talked to a couple of the counter people who worked the same shift. She ate there and checked out around nine. No fanfare, just, ‘good-bye, I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
They paused in their meeting as the waiter brought over a tray of assorted hamburgers, sandwiches, sodas, and chips. Unlike the old days before Stallings had become a cop, there wasn’t much drinking on duty anymore. He knew that he was headed back out onto the streets for a few hours after dinner and he didn’t need the guilt or effects of a couple of beers.
He was pleased to see everyone else agreed. As he thought about that and looked down the table at Patty, he realized he’d never seen her drink.
That was a dedicated cop.
William Dremmel sat in his silent Nissan Quest with the driver’s window down and the cool Atlantic breeze pushing the majority of bugs right past him. He was only a block from Stacey Hines’s little apartment, which was attached to a larger, single-family house. The space that normally held her Escort was empty, and he was waiting
